


sympathy for the devil

by darlingargents



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dark, Brainwashing, Community: comment_fic, Consent Issues, F/M, Kidnapping, No Sex, Obsessive Behavior, Sith, Sith Leia Organa, Stockholm Syndrome, kind of, the consent issues are not about sex, this got darker than intended whoOPS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-02-22 23:47:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13177791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingargents/pseuds/darlingargents
Summary: Prompt: Han Solo/Sith!Leia Organa, "When a Monster is not a Monster, oh how you love it"





	sympathy for the devil

Han tried to avoid Coruscant, but sometimes it couldn’t be avoided.

The bar where he was meeting his contact was deep in the levels of Coruscant. Before the Empire, they would have thought that meant they were safe. But rumours swirled now. Rumours of the Emperor’s servants, of Darth Vader and his children, beings so evil their names were never spoken. It was said that they always knew when illegal things happened on their planet, and only let it go if they believed it would not harm the Empire.

Han’s deal was spice trading. He didn’t know if that counted as harmful or not, but he wasn’t happy to be meeting here.

He spent the whole meeting with his hand on his blaster. At the end, they shook hands, and he made his way back to his ship with pockets full of credits and a lighter load. Chewie would be waiting there.

In the deeper levels of Coruscant, sunlight was nonexistent; it got filtered out almost at the very top, and everything had to be lit by streetlights, even in the middle of the day. Han knew, from his chrono, that it was the middle of the afternoon, but the level he was on was empty of anything that would indicate that it wasn’t the dead of night. The lights flickered as he passed them. The only living things he saw were fluttering curtains that fell closed as he passed and a tooka or two running down an alley.

Yeah, it was creepy. He reached into a pocket and wrapped his fingers around one of the credits, feeling the cool medal warm in his hand. Worth it. He could get a nice meal, a nice bed, maybe some new parts for the _Falcon_.

Somewhere far, far away from this planet.

Han was so on edge that he didn’t realize that there was something wrong until he got onto the ship. He ignored the hairs rising on the back of his neck and the creeping feeling that something was going to go very wrong, and quickly sought out the safe hidden in his ship to deposit the credits.

When he locked the safe, he realized there was a reason for the unease.

The ship was far too quiet.

“Chewie?” he called out, grasping his blaster and slowly turning around. There was no response. The darkened corners of the ship looked like gaping mouths, laughing; ready to swallow him whole.

Laughter.

He spun around. There was no one. But the faint giggle, girlish and sickly sweet, was still there, fading like the ring of a bell — slowly and tauntingly, never knowing when it was actually gone.

Han primed the blaster to fire, and moved.

He looked in every room of the ship. Every compartment where Chewie could fit. Nothing. The laugh hadn’t happened again, but he thought he could still hear it. Would hear it forever.

The blaster, primed and ready, was warming in his hand. He kept his fingers tight around it, even though they were slippery with sweat, and got off the ship, closing and locking it behind him.

As the door slid shut, the laugh came again. Louder, this time. More delighted. Sweet as rotting fruit and terrifying like nothing Han had ever known.

There was no one in the spaceport, either, when Han looked around, the laugh still ringing in his head, varying in volume and pitch. Not fading. “Chewie?” he called again, knowing it was probably stupid, but hoping to any god that was listening that his friend was just playing a prank on him.

_Not a prank._

Han spun around so quickly he nearly tripped. The spaceport was still empty. The voice was inside his head.

“Stop,” he said. “Get out of my head.”

“For a pretty face like you? Sure.”

The words were spoken aloud, coming from the entrance where Han had come in. He turned to face it, sweat trickling down the back of his neck.

There was a girl standing there.

At first glance, normal-looking. Human. Dark, wavy hair hanging to her shoulders. A black cloak that enveloped her body, hiding everything but her head. Dark, piercing eyes.

But she looked… wrong. Just subtly. Her skin was alarmingly pale. Her cheeks were sunken in, her cheekbones sharp as blades. She looked like she’d seen things, done things, lived a long and terrible life, but she couldn’t have been more than twenty, if even that.

And when she smiled — her closed, dark-painted lips stretching into a mockery of a joyful expression — and her beautiful eyes, dark like pits in the ground, turned a burning gold, Han felt the last of his hope disappear.

* * *

Her name was Darth Ferio, except when it was Leia. She sent Chewie off Coruscant with more credits than he could ever spend in a lifetime, and a promise that Han will be protected and cared for. Han didn’t know what she’d do if Chewie tried to help him, so he told his friend, through gritted teeth, that he was perfectly happy and chose to be there.

Chewie didn’t full believe him, Han knew. But his friend, his best friend forever, let it slide. And leaves Han alone. As much as it hurt the selfish part of him, Han is grateful.

Ferio never forced. She gave Han free reign of an estate in the full Coruscant sun that was bigger than any house he’d ever seen before. She visited almost daily, but never tried anything. Just watched him. Spent time with him. Gently probed at his mind until he told her to get out.

She looked different in the sun. Her hair wasn’t quite so dark; there were threads of gold running through it, and while to Han the colour gold was now only associated with those terrifying eyes, it still made her look more alive. There was a bit of colour in her cheeks. She didn’t always wear an shapeless black cloak; sometimes she wore dresses that Han could tell likely cost more than the yearly salary of a reasonably well-off Coruscantian, or even simple, incognito spacer’s clothes.

He couldn’t figure her out.

She could take anything she wanted, he knew. He had full access to the holonet there, and he’d looked up her kill count. Her abilities were reported with remarkable consistency. She could reach into his head and make him believe that he loved her. She could hold him in place and do whatever she wanted to him. But she never did.

After maybe a month in the estate, Ferio started talking to him.

At first, Han refused to listen. She was his captor. She possessed his body. He wasn’t going to give her his attention as well. But she kept at it, every day, until Han got so incredibly bored of humming songs or reciting monologues from holodramas to drown it out that he gave in and listened, though still refusing to respond.

She told him about her life. How her mother died when she was a baby, and how her father, after killing his Sith mentor and his former Jedi mentor, found her and her brother and raised them to take over for him when he died. How she had grown up with blood and death, and had never known a normal life.

It was all a sob story, Han knew. She was a murderer with a kill count in the hundreds, and that was only counting personal and up-close; no one knew how many others she’d ordered dead or killed in ways that couldn’t be traced back to her.

He knew it didn’t matter. But hearing it… hearing about the things she had to witness as a child, the things she had to do to other sentients when she was barely old enough to read… it wasn’t hard to follow that to the slaughterer she became, the woman who held him captive.

It didn’t quite track with the fact that she hadn’t killed him, or done worse. She was just keeping him, as a sympathetic ear. Or, maybe, an ear who wouldn’t just tremble in fear when they were in the same room.

Han wasn’t afraid of her anymore. Either she would kill him or she wouldn’t; he had no control over it. As much as he hated this, he tried to enjoy the sun and the free food and opulence. He probably only had so long.

* * *

It had been almost a year when Ferio finally did something. Han was in bed when she showed up, trying to sleep; it wasn’t hard to relax his breathing even more and pretend he was already sleeping. He felt more than heard her step into the room, and towards him.

As she got closer and stopped, standing over him, Han had to fight to keep his breaths even and his face relaxed. She leaned down, and Han felt two fingers brush lightly over his cheek.

He couldn’t stop his breath from stuttering at that. Her fingers were soft, and the gesture was… sweet. It felt like a gentle caress, an act of caring.

A shiver of wanting ran through him. Not even necessarily sexual — just to hold her close and kiss her breath away. The image came to his mind, and with it, a sharp, piercing sensation of horror.

Brainwashing. That had to be it. Because there was no way he could ever fall for his captor. No way.

Her fingers moved away from his cheek, and for a moment Han felt the loss keenly. Then she touched him again, one finger under his chin to lift his face up just a little.

And then she kissed him.

It was nothing he would have ever expected from her, even after she touched his face so gently. It was soft and sweet and chaste, closed lips and a warm breath exhaled against his cheek before she broke away. It felt like his first kiss as a child, maybe eight or nine, with another girl in the village. They had been play-fighting, covered in dirt, and he’d asked if he could kiss her. She’d said okay and he had leaned it.

It was like that. Just as innocent, from a woman who was drenched in the blood of innocents.

She stood up, and Han kept himself still. Kept his breathing as even as he could. She didn’t move, and for a moment he thought she would leave and he would have gotten away with it.

“I heard you,” she said. Her voice was soft, but Han could hear it clearly; she was just close enough. “I apologize for not asking permission. But I heard it. In your head. You wanted it.”

Han froze. He didn’t move or blink. A maelstrom of emotions was swirling inside him. Slowly, he opened his eyes, and looked at her.

In the darkness of the room, she was only illuminated by the streetlights shining in through the blinds over the window, making bars of light against her. Her eyes were in the dark, and glowing a soft gold. Her hands, in the light and hanging by her side, were balled into fists.

Neither of them moved for a long, painful moment. Then she turned and left.

Han didn’t sleep that night.

* * *

Han didn’t accept that he’d fallen in love with her until it had been a year and a half.

* * *

A week after that, she let him go.

* * *

As soon as the _Falcon_ flew away from Coruscant for good, Han started shaking uncontrollably, and went to his room, locking the door behind him. If the door was locked, if he lay in bed and closed his eyes, he could pretend he was back there, and she was there, too.

They had never done more than kiss. And that only twice. The time that Han had pretended to sleep, and the day before she let him go. The second time, at least he’d been able to kiss her back. But it wasn’t enough. It never would be.

He dreamed about her that night. And the next. And the next.

When he dreamed, he called her by her name.

_Leia_.

* * *

The image of her eyes would never leave Han. The glowing gold.

If he looked close enough, it looked almost flecked with red.

He could have drowned in those eyes.

It surprised him that once, he’d been afraid of them.

* * *

Sometimes when he couldn’t sleep — when the nightmares, even when they delivered her face to him, were too much to bear — he sat in the cockpit of the _Falcon_ as it drifted through empty space.

He watched the distant stars, cold and burning, and wondered if he was seeing her.

It wasn’t enough. But it was something.

**Author's Note:**

> sorry?
> 
> i might return to this someday -- i don't love how it ends -- but this was really draining for me to write, emotionally, and i probably need a break if i ever want to come back to this story.
> 
> also leia's sith name comes from a list of latin words for "kill", which is a great resource for sith names since there are apparently so many


End file.
